Later this year, Oracle will begin requiring people interested in gaining Java and Solaris certifications to attend "hands-on" training courses, at an additional cost of thousands of dollars. The new rule goes into effect Aug. 1 and regards Java Architect, Java Developer, Solaris System Administrator and Solaris Security Administrator certification paths, according to a notice on Oracle's website.

I wouldn't disagree with you at all -I have heard the same said about the technology.

I worked for Sun for 10+ years finishing in 2009 doing systems engineering and OS deployment. I joined an embryonic small company. You'd think I'd be a textbook example of someone bringing the awesome power of Solaris into a new environment.

Instead, with all the problems/concerns around licensing and future availability I personally made the decision to move to debian/ubuntu for all our servers, postgres for the DBs, and to a lesser extent avoiding java for software. This was definitely a case where the technology took a back seat in the decision making.

It really pains me that I had to do this but the uncertainty and this kind of ad hoc policy change and encroaching charges could kill a small company if they were trapped.

I'm in the same boat. I work for a small engineering firm, and I would love to ditch Openfiler (that decision pre-dates my tenure) and move our NAS over to Solaris for ZFS and better iSCSI support. Unfortunately, I can't for the exact reasons you mentioned.

Our Red Hat/CentOS boxes work great, and we will probably stick with that. If OpenSolaris still existed, I might be able to slip some stuff in, but not now.